Mr N

This is one of my pet gripes. So I’m just going to explain why it’s such a problem. One of my roles here at BigSoft is to support various companies with their corporate network and the solutions that we have provided. Occasionally I get emails requesting support. I realise that not everyone is as computer literate as me and there are various shades of aptitudes. Choosing the Subject for an email is the important thing. Not only does it allow the email to be safely filed and easily retrieved, but it gets me thinking about your problem even before I have opened the email. I can judge how long it is going to take to respond - which makes me feel better. Although my emotional well being is not generally the issue, it does make me want to “go the extra mile” because I know they are actually interested in helping “us” solve the problem. I have kept all the email sent to me and all the email I have sent out for the last 5 years, so as you can imagine there is quite a lot! Digging out old emails is difficult at the best of times and so having an email Subject that describes the contents of the email is hugely valuable. So in an effort to make the general populace aware that some subjects just make my life unnecessarily complicated, I will list some of the more common Subjects that don’t really help or ingratiate yourself on the support person you are trying to engage. Help Hi Problem It’s broken Urgent problem Urgent help needed Some people write Urgent for almost everything. If a person writes this it means that they couldn’t be bothered to check the box which sends the email with a higher priority so it’s not actually that urgent. They have done whatever is easiest for them which shows that they are not really interested in solving the issue together - they just want you to do all the work so they can wash their hands of it. The subject is particular useful when using mailing lists or forums. You only need to spend a couple of seconds looking at some of the forums before you find the kinds of unhelpful subject titles I’m talking about. You will quickly see that the posts with a better subject have been read more times and as a consequence have more responses. I think that I have ranted enough. Needless to say that providing a good email subject that clearly states the intention of the email will get you better responses quicker.

Windows Remote Desktop allows users to use a Windows computer while not sitting in front of it. This is ideal for remote support. For security this feature is not switched on in the standard installation and so must be explicitly activated. In order to use Remote Desktop you must have a password set up on your machine. Below is a simple guide to switching this feature on:

1. Load File Explorer
2. Right click on My Computer select Properties
3. Click the Remote tab
4. Check Allow users to connect remotely to this computer
   On Windows 2008: Allow connections from computers running any version of Remote Desktop (less secure)
5. Click Ok

The Apache Tomcat instructions on this are here but they are both worse than useless and totally acurate. It starts we the sentence:

This section of the documentation applies to procrun 1.0, and is now obsolete

Great! Now what. There is no link to the document that supersedes it, nor what procrun is! Typical open source documentation! As with all these thinks you have to go reading old mail archives to find the answer. Buried about half way down an archive page on a generalist open source support web site is the answer. procrun is a thin (’C') executable program that can run java classes. An extension of procrun is prunsrv which also knows how to register services with windows. Now, here is the gem of information that lets everything make sense. The vital piece of information that would save everyone who reads the Apache Tomcat Windows documentation 2 hours of searching for…. wait for it….. Tomcat has compiled up prunsrv.exe with the instructions for starting and stopping Tomcat and renamed it to tomcat6.exe. If you find your tomcat6.exe executable, right click it and select Properties. Go to the Version tab and select Original File name is says “prunsrv.exe". The original Tomcat documentation is actually correct, the documentation page is obsolete because you should be reading the prunsrv.exe documentation. But good luck finding that - only kidding it’s here!.

Seems like an obvious one, but I keep forgetting where the OutLook Express executable is. So as this is the brain extension, I’ll add it here for all time.

c:\program files\outlook express\msimn.exe

Once you have loaded it in, you can switch on (or off) the preview pane.

1. View->Layout
2. In the Preview pane section check (or uncheck) show preview pane

An interesting illusion with a checker board. Are those lines parallel? http://hcpcrew.at/pix/illu_003.gif The second one is a bit rude: http://hcpcrew.at/pix/chinese.jpg